Cars (PG)

Stuck in third gear

If there's a problem attached to being the greatest animation studio in the world, it's that anything even slightly below your own Olympian standards will be judged a dip in form. Pixar Studios, in rendering the everyday struggles of toys and bugs and fish into mini-epics of droll invention, have led us to hope that everything they produce will be a masterpiece. Even their sequels are gold: is there a more serious challenger to Godfather II as the best follow-up in cinema than Toy Story 2?

Now, roaring into view, comes Cars, Pixar's latest, another precision-tooled vehicle. It is visually handsome, verbally agile and loaded with the kind of firecracker wit that has characterised the studio's output from Toy Story (1995) onwards. But it's not a masterpiece, or anything like, and its subject-matter feels wildly out of sync with the zeitgeist: at a time when oil prices are bubbling up and global warming has been acknowledged as a problem even in America, the last thing we need from movies is another celebration of driving.

But that's what we've got. Though a folksy kind of tale, Cars is not just about cars; it is entirely peopled by them. Plunged into the screeching hullabaloo of a race-car circuit, you observe the spectators, the pit crews, the TV commentators, the hot-dog seller and they're all... cars. Foremost among them is the rookie hot-rod Lightning McQueen (affably voiced by Owen Wilson), a rising star fuelled on ambition and self-regard: "I create feelings in others that they themselves don't understand," he brags, and just beneath the whine of his engine we hear nemesis grinding its gears. Sure enough, on the way to California for a big race McQueen gets stranded way off the map in the small town of Radiator Springs, once a merry pit-stop on Route 66, now a near-ghost town after the interstate passed it by.

We are in the melancholy, twilit terrain of The Last Picture Show, and the vehicles have the retro look to match. There's the rusty old tow-truck that talks like a Texan farmhand, an old-time Hornet from the 1950s (Paul Newman, with gravel-voiced integrity), a lachrymose fire-engine, an excitable Italian garage owner, and a wheezy sheriff with a radiator grille for a moustache. McQueen wouldn't usually be seen dead in such unglamorous company - "I'm in hillbilly hell!" - but he's sentenced to resurface the town's main drag after he tears it up. In the course of this remedial roadwork he will learn that camaraderie and the pleasures of small-town tranquillity are worth more than his speedfreak career. He also has his fender turned by the lovely Porsche girl, Sally, who detects a kinder McQueen beneath the brash scarlet paint-job. One of the funniest sight-gags comes during their getting-to-know-you rambles around the countryside, when McQueen smiles and unwittingly reveals a grille silted up with old leaves - a variant on the spinach-between-the-teeth moment that's weirdly hilarious: we are watching two cars romance one another.

Yet it's the romance of the road which director John Lasseter and his team of writers are keener to salute. The shadow of obsolescence looms large over the denizens of Radiator Springs, who sense, like Woody and Buzz in Toy Story 2, that their time might be up. The road ain't what it used to be: "Cars drove on it not to make great time, but to have a great time". The difference is underlined by Randy Newman's score, switching from the turbo-charged rock of the opening race scenes to meditative bluegrass once the action slows down in Radiator Springs. Cars wants to be a hymn to a gentler, more innocent way of life, to the days when folk stopped to talk to one another and cows wobbled their way up main street.

But, of course, nostalgia in this movie's terms precludes most human interaction: here "folk" are cars, and the cows are tractors. Cars isn't lamenting the ubiquity of the car, it's lamenting the changes in American technology and infrastructure - not exactly a snappy phrase you could use on the trailer. Several great movies actually have been made about such changes, including The Magnificent Ambersons and The Wild Bunch, both of them set around the advent of the automobile and both regarding it with trepidation. The idea would seem impossibly quaint to moviegoers today, but if anyone could have suggested the way cars have become a boon and a bane, it was surely Pixar. What a pleasing irony it might have been had these arch technocrats set about dismantling the myth of this all-American icon's "greatness".

Sadly, that isn't how it's turned out. And, while there are many incidental squiggles and curlicues of detail to delight the eye - I just loved the licence plate on the hippie VW van that's meant to be a goatee - one wonders if the long middle section will enthrall the younger audience.

Which leaves the adults to worry about pollution, oil crises and how we're all going to hell in a handcart. Car chases have been a staple of the movies for so long it's difficult to know how they'd cope without them. Where to go for speed now in these eco-conscious times? Electric cars? Scooters? Handcarts? Thinking about this could get you down, though it won't be quite as disheartening as the moment I recognised a British TV presenter voicing McQueen's agent, and wondered if I could decently recommend a film with Jeremy Clarkson in it.